The Lifeboat Foundation has a special report detailing their view of the top ten transhumanist technologies that have some probability of 25 to 30-year availability. Transhumanism is a movement devoted to using technologies to transcend biology and enhance human capabilities.

I am going to list out each of the ten technologies described in the report, provide my own assessment of high, medium, or low probability or mass-market availability by a given time horizon, and link to prior articles written on The Futurist about the subject.

10. Cryonics : 2025 - Low, 2050 - Moderate

I can see the value in someone who is severely maimed or crippled opting to freeze themselves until better technologies become available for full restoration. But outside of that, the problem with cryonics is that very few young people will opt to risk missing their present lives to go into freezing, and elderly people can only benefit after revival when or if age-reversal technologies become available. Since going into cryonic freezing requires someone else to decide when to revive you, and any cryonic 'will' may not anticipate numerous future variables that could complicate execution of your instructions, this is a bit too risky, even if it were possible.

The good news here is that gene sequencing techniques continue to become faster due to the computers used in the process themselves benefiting from Moore's Law. In the late 1980s, it was thought that the human genome would take decades to sequence. It ended up taking only years by the late 1990s, and today, would take only months. Soon, it will be cost-effective for every middle-class person to get their own personal genome sequenced, and get customized medicines made just for them.

While this is a staple premise of most science fiction, I do not think that space colonization may ever take the form that is popularly imagined. Technology #2 on this list, mind uploading, and technology #5, self-replicating robots, will probably appear sooner than any capability to build cities on Mars. Thus, a large spaceship and human crew becomes far less efficient than entire human minds loaded into tiny or even microscopic robots that can self-replicate. A human body may never visit another star system, but copies of human minds could very well do so.

Artificial limbs, ears, and organs are already available, and continue to improve. Artificial and enhanced muscle, skin, and eyes are not far.

5. Autonomous Self-Replicating Robots : 2030 - Moderate

This is a technology that is frightening, due to the ease at which humans could be quickly driven to extinction through a malfunction that replicates rouge robots. Assuming a disaster does not occur, this is the most practical means of space exploration and colonization, particular if the robots contain uploads of human minds, as per #2.

From the Great Wall of China in ancient times to Dubai's Palm Islands today, man-made structures are already visible from space. But to achieve transhumanism, the same must be done in space. Eventually, elevators extending hundreds of miles into space, space stations much larger than the current ISS (240 feet), and vast orbital solar reflectors will be built. But, as stated in item #7, I don't think true megascale projects (over 1000 km in width) will happen before other transhumanist technologies render the need for them obsolete.

2. Mind Uploading : 2050 - Moderate

This is what I believe to be the most important technology on this list. Today, when a person's hardware dies, their software in the form of their thoughts, memories, and humor, necessarily must also die. This is impractical in a world where software files in the form of video, music, spreadsheets, documents, etc. can be copied to an indefinite number of hardware objects.

If human thoughts can reside on a substrate other than human brain matter, then the 'files' can be backed up. That is all there is to it.

1. Artificial General Intelligence : 2050 - Moderate

This is too vast of a subject to discuss here. Some evidence of progress appears in unexpected places, such as when, in 1997, IBM's Deep Blue defeated Gary Kasparov in a chess game. Ray Kurzweil believes that an artificial intelligence will pass the Turing Test (a bellwether test of AI) by 2029. We will have to wait and see, but expect the unexpected, when you least expect it.

Forbes has a whole feature on Solar Energy this week. Within, I found a chart that I have been seeking for a long time - a chart tracking the declining cost of electricity generated by photovoltaic surfaces.

It appears that cost parity with present residential electricity rates is finally imminent. Also, migration to solar power could happen rapidly before full cost parity due to tax breaks, and the fact that solar energy is generated at the time of day when electricity rates are already the highest.

For reference, below is a chart of US solar intensity. It is quite possible that by 2020, many homes in the southern US will have photovoltaic surfaces on their rooftops. This, combined with the spread of plug-in hybrids and fully electric vehicles (including those from Tesla motors, which come with their own included solar panel), will lead to a fascinating simultaneous shift from a portion of coal consumption to renewables (solar, wind), and from a portion of petroleum consumption to electricity. So solar would indirectly eat into a small slice of oil consumption.

As long-time readers know, this weblog has an optimistic outlook on most aspects of our future. However, there is one particular topic on which I have not yet written, even though I read every available article on the subject. It is a topic on which I can't assign a sizable probability to any positive outcome. It is the topic of Pakistan and it's nuclear weapons.

Pakistan is a country that did not exist until 1947, when it was carved out of British India at the time of Indian Independence. There were two non-contiguous pieces of Pakistan on either side of India, and East Pakistan separated to become Bangladesh in 1971, after a genocide in East Pakistan killed 1.5 million people (from Wikipedia).

Today, the remaining nation of Pakistan still has 160 million people, the political boundaries of which still do not corelate to any particular ethnic homogeniety. In a nutshell, the massive Indus river flows through the middle of the country, to the east of which reside Punjabi and Sindhi groups, which are quite Indian-like in appearance, language, cuisine, and culture, and to the west of which are found Pashtuns and other groups with a distinctly Turkic and Persian culture and appearance. The Indus river has historically been the natural boundary between Indian and Turco-Persian civilizations for over 2000 years, and evidence of this is visible in Pakistan to this day (image from Wikipedia).

But this 75% of Pakistan is secondary. The most crucial region is actually the most remote, most medieval, most undeveloped segment of Pakistan, where under 10% of the population resides. It is the Northwest Frontier Province and Waziristan, where Pakistan's government has never had total control, and where local tribal customs were the only recognized law. Until the Taliban and Al-Qaeda came to town.

Now, to grasp the magnitude of the potential horror, consider the following three facts :

1) Pakistan has 30-50 nuclear weapons. Whether this technology was delivered directly by China or through North Korea in the 1990s is moot at this point.

2) Al-Qaeda and the Taliban now control many districts of Northern Pakistan, with Ayman al-Zawahiri and Osama bin Laden (if still alive) also residing there. Pakistan's army and government have little power to expel Al-Qaeda and the Taliban, and they continually attempt to assassinate President Pervez Musharraf.

3) The founder of Pakistan's nuclear program, Abdul Qadeer Khan, was found to be selling nuclear secrets in the black market. His customer list is still unknown, and there may have been, or still be, others like him.

I can't see how the combination of these 3 facts can result in anything other than the detonation of a nuclear weapon in an act of terrorism against a major US or European city, between now and 2020. Can anyone say with confidence that the probability of this is low?

Pakistan has already had nuclear weapons for 9 or more years, so why is the risk greater now? This brings us back to point 2), and to understand the ominous trend of the Taliban gaining control over a greater and greater share of Pakistan, read some of Bill Roggio's articles. In particular, this map tracks the rate of advancement of the Taliban's control, and distinctly shows them to be metastasizing deeply into Pakistan at an alarming rate.

President Musharraf is nominally an ally of the US in the War on Terror, to the extent that he cracks down on terrorists when US demands to do so reach a certain intensity. But this secular dictator is the thinnest of buffers between the current state and a nightmare scenario. If Musharraf is assassinated and theocratic rule prevails in Pakistan, it would be far worse than the 1979 events in Iran. Whatever remaining chance there is for terrorists being prevented from gaining access to nuclear weapons (if it is already not too late) resides with President Musharraf, or a similarly secular successor, remaining in power.

If the Taliban do come into power, the options are few. While a simple invasion by the US, India, and NATO would dispose of the Taliban quickly, it may not prevent them from retaining and smuggling out the nuclear weapon capabilities. While most Punjabi and Sindhi Pakistanis have no desire to be ruled by the Taliban, they may not be able to throw off the yoke of subjugation even through a massive civil war (again, with the nuclear technology easily walking off).